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Film criticism for the rest of us.

ENDURANCE TEST TUESDAYS #2 – LIVE FROM COLORADO

While in Colorado, I enjoyed the scenery. I looked at the mountains, marveled the silence, and reveled in being at peace. It was the kind of peace that made me depressed that “Endurance Test Tuesdays” was coming soon. The time in which I willingly (and masochistically) watch the very worst shit out there, and review it. Like I said last week, Endurance Tests can come in any length or any style. The only big rule is that they can’t be gross/gory/too easy to make me quit with. Aside from that, it’s fair game… With that said, this week’s Endurance Test is…

SNOW WHITE & THE SEVEN DWARVES (THE SHITTY ONE)

(Submitted by Tara L.)

So, imagine a not-that-great-to-begin-with story is put in the hands of a plumber, and that plumber is forced to make an animated movie about it at gunpoint. This is what you get with this garbage, except part of me wishes that the trigger was pulled.

Calling this “animation” is like calling someone who masturbates on camera a “pornstar”. Obviously, not everyone who has sex can be a “pornstar”, just like not everyone who can draw stick figures can be an animator. This was clearly done by people who have never touched a pencil and a piece of paper ever in their lives. And, if they did, then I’d question why it looks like this:

Before you die, you’ll see this face.

You can take a screenshot from any moment of this, and be amazed at the levels of ineptitude to the actual animation. It reminded me of the 60’s Spider-Man cartoon. There is constant recycling of images and animation sequences recut into different places to give the illusion of different sequences happening. I mean, even the same animation sequences are reused with different characters put on top of them. The actual images themselves seem weirdly unnatural. The eyes are all dead. All of them. And, every character in the video seems like they were created from Microsoft Word clipart.

So, I don’t feel the need to recap the “Snow White” story. But, you’d be forgiven if you watched this boring piece of non-entertainment thinking its good for your kids, I mean, c’mon. The story of “Snow White” has only felt grown up in a precious few instances. One of those being the original Grimm fairy tale. Ironically, this version takes most of its cues from the original text. But, I don’t think people remember how repetitive the original text was. The story follows this pattern.

1. Evil Queen tries to poison Snow White. It doesn’t work.

2. Evil Queen tries to poison Snow White again. It doesn’t work.

3. Evil Queen tries to poison Snow White yet again. This time, it only sorta/kinda works.

This “Snow White” is still a better actress than Kristen Stewart.

Walt Disney’s “Snow White” streamlined the story so it wouldn’t be as boring. Because, no one ever said the Brothers Grimm were great storytellers (spoiler alert: they’re not). The story elements here seem at odds with the clearly kid-friendly approach to the animation. Like, the ending where the Evil Queen is forced to put on molten-hot metal boots and dance in them until she dies of shock? Yeah, that shows up here (shittily).

It became clear about 6 minutes in that this was made by people in which English isn’t their first language. Like, the Evil Queen sounded like she was trying to do a Christopher Walken impression with her lines, and everyone else had confusing accents. Even the narrator sounded like that guy who sang “Chocolate Rain”. After doing a little more digging, I realized that this was animated by a South Indian production house that puts out shitty animated things like this. And, they’re all in English. Fairly broken English, that is. So much so, that they had to put subtitles on it. However, even the subtitles are written in broken English too. It reminded me of this:

Another thing that tipped me off to the cheapness of the production is the use of stock music. Musical cues are looped on top of each other, one after another. Even blatantly ripping off music from other movies (mostly Jerry Bruckheimer action movies). Like, you could put “score produced by someone who REALLY likes 90’s Hans Zimmer”, and you’d be accurate. But, there is also a style of film scoring, specifically for children/family films, that I hate more than anything else. And, that appears here in spades. Like, it’s trailer music for shitty direct-to-video Disney movies (Space Buddies, anyone?)…

Look, here’s the gist… This is fucking boring. This is the most boring thing I’ve watched in a long long time. It’s not a fun type of bad, it’s not an angering type of bad. It’s just boring. I was actively fighting sleep while watching this, hoping that something interesting would happen in its 50 minute run time. When nothing did, I abandoned hope, and secretly wished that this would be a “ring” type of scenario, and a little girl would climb out of the computer screen, and kill me.

Since that didn’t happen, I have to give it this “cringe-meter” rating:

2.5 of 5.0

Every Tuesday, I will watch and review whatever terrible shit you send me. You can send me stuff to watch via facebook… Post it to my wall, and next Tuesday, you’ll see which video(s) made the cut. So, send in your submissions (facebook.com/LewisMorrisPoetry) before Friday!